The Finney County Historical Museum’s long-running Brown Bag Lunch history lecture series will resume, and extensively expand, beginning next week.

The series has offered a free, live program about history or related topics at noon each Tuesday in February, with listeners welcome to bring their own lunch and learn about the past. The revised series will switch to a year-round basis, with sessions scheduled at noon on the second Wednesday of each month, beginning on Aug. 8. Subsequent 2018 sessions are planned Sept. 12, Oct. 10 and Nov. 14.

The change will boost the number of yearly lunch hour history lectures from four to as many as 12. As with the original Brown Bag series, the museum will provide beverages and dessert. Admission will remain free, with access through the north museum entrance.

The expanded schedule is taking place on a trial basis, so there may be periodic adjustments. Meanwhile, the parallel Evening at the Museum series will continue as before, providing free programs at 7 p.m. on the third Tuesday of the month, August through November and January through April.

VETERAN HISTORY TEACHER AT PODIUM

The opening noon hour program on Aug. 8 will feature retired Garden City middle school history instructor Norman Clark, sharing recollections and remembrances from 41 years of teaching history courses. Various Southwest Kansas residents and community leaders sat in Clark’s classroom at Abe Hubert Middle School over the decades, and the courtyard at Horace Good Middle School is named in his honor. Clark is a periodic guest speaker for the Finney County Historical Society.

Subsequent Brown Bag Lunch noon presentations include Taking Care of Your Health, offered Sept. 12 by Alicia Gian Maciulis, managing owner of Roots Juice and Co. Wellness Studio; and a session Oct. 10 by Katie Herrick, Johnson City, director of the Stanton County Historical Museum. Herrick will offer advice on what to do with objects and articles accumulated over a lifetime. Her presentation entitled “Your Kids Don’t Want Your Stuff and Neither Does the Museum.”

The concluding noon program in the fall segment, “Self-Publishing Your Family History,” will be conducted by Jay Cook, Garden City, an accomplished genealogy researcher and author. It will take place Nov. 14.

EVENING HISTORY LECTURES TOO

Meanwhile, the Evenings at the Museum series is scheduled to open Aug. 21. Structured somewhat like the Brown Bag series, lectures take place at 7 p.m. the third Tuesday of each month, also with free admission, beverages and dessert. Like the noon segments, patrons are welcome to bring their own meals, and should use the museum’s north entrance.

The fall series will also feature “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words,” 7 p.m. Oct. 16, offered by Hebrlee, focusing on ways to trace and discern history through photographs of the past. The autumn sessions will end with a special Saturday program at 7 p.m. Nov. 10. That presentation and moderated discussion, hosted by Humanities Kansas, will be based on a film about the experience of walking across the state, produced by Kansas native Patrick Ross. The session is one of four, with others scheduled in Hays, Lawrence and Wichita, all hosted by the organization previously known as the Kansas Humanities Council.

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